Publish together or perish: the increasing number of authors per article in academic journals is the consequence of a changing scientific culture. Some researchers define authorship quite loosely.

Abstract

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, No grand idea was ever born in a conference – an allusion to the tendency of groups to overdiscuss the ideas of their members. Literary writers compose their works alone, not in collaboration with others. For scientists, the situation is rather different: in medicine, for example, group authorship is the rule, and single-author publications in academic journals are the exception. Publish or perish, the familiar guiding principle of academic life, seems to have been transformed into a new principle, Publish together or perish. This is a trend of the last few decades. The mean number of authors of scientific reviews or original articles in Deutsches Arzteblatt has risen from 1 in 1957 to 3.55 last year (figure 1). Figures from other journals confirm the trend: in Der Nervenarzt, a German journal of neurology and psychiatry, the mean number of authors per article was 1.1 in 1930, 1.4 by the late 1960s, and 3.4 for the five-year period from 1996 to 2000 (1). A similar development can be observed in English-language periodicals. For example, the mean number of authors per original article in the British Medical Journal rose from 3.2 in 1975 to 4.5 twenty years later (2). This trend has continued without interruption to the present, as shown in figure 2 with figures from five further journals (3). Figure 1 The trend in the number of authors per article in Deutsches Arzteblatt over the past 50 years. The figures depicted on the graph are the mean numbers of authors of original and review articles (value for 1957: 1; for 2007: 3.55 authors). Figure 2 The trend in the mean number of authors per article in various medical journals over the 10-year period from 1995 to 2005. The figures depicted on the graph are the mean numbers of authors of original and review articles (including case reports); editorials, ... How can this increase be explained? Over the past two decades, the number of physicians at German medical schools – a large majority of the authors of medical articles in Germany work in university hospitals or in preclinical teaching and research institutions – has risen only slightly. According to the German Federal Statistical Office, the number rose by a bit more than one-tenth from 1991 to 2006, from 22 000 to 24 500 (approximate figures). This might be a reason for the larger number of publications originating from German medical schools (4), just as the increased number of medical publications worldwide is surely due, at least in part, to the increased number of medical scientists (5). With more potential authors available, it would be reasonable to expect more articles to be published, but the observed rise in the number of authors per article still demands an explanation. Furthermore, the 56-percent increase in this variable from 1991 to 2006 (taking Deutsches Arzteblatt as an example) vastly exceeds the increase in the number of medical scientists. The main reason for the increased number of authors per article is presumably to be found in the type of research strategy that currently prevails in science. Collaboration increasingly seems to be the prerequisite for discovery; in other words, the scientific team has largely replaced the old ideal of the brilliant researcher working alone.